The current models of mesh restoration known in the art do not take into account the effect of a large number of connections simultaneously failing because of a transmission failure. Such an incident, although rare, does cause outages that significantly affect a large number of users.
The additional traffic growth and bandwidth demands now experienced on optical cross connects in optical networks has created a need for a control plane enhancement in an optical cross connect that allows for traffic growth to continue while maintaining the network performance to end user customers.
Thus, what is needed is a method and system that allow a network operator to identify key segments, also called spans, in an optical mesh network where a large number of connections traverse. By enabling the bundling of these individual network connections transported over a particular span or spans, the network operator manages the bundle as if it were one network connection. Additionally, what is needed is a method and system that allow other network links to support these bundled connections when the network segment that a bundle currently is traversing fails. The present invention provides such a method and system.